Ofc, no. But I made some charts to promote Prime recruitment and really needed a more clickbaity title.

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Lately there have been a lot of different opinions on CW popularity:
- "Clan Wars DYING?!?!" (popular topic from Dec 2021)
- "The competition is not working" (An opinion from the leader of a very competitive CW clan)
- "I think the current CW system is flawless" (a very active player from TOP-5 clan)
- "Clam wars is fine" (another very active player from TOP-5 clan)
- "feels like there is more CW activity the last seasons" (from global chat)

Let's just see the participation trends!

Disclaimer: Mostly by the responsible use of Warzone API data was gathered on the games of CW seasons. The data does not include free wins, and counts 2v2 games as 1 game (because I was lazy).

Here is the main chart:



The hanging tails are the last days of the seasons.

As you can see, that after CW was really dying in the end of 2021, the participation after that has improved and currently we are at this years highest participation.

I have no idea, what has caused that. Was it...:
- the sole effect of shorter seasons?
- the coin prizes increase in the beginning of the year?
- spike of CW discussions in the summer of 2022?

What do you think guys? Are we living the dream of CW renaissance?

And also a very neat chart on participation within seasons, which demonstrates the issue of participation falling off.

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BTW, Prime is recruiting.
We offer:
- a relaxed and chill clan atmosphere
- high CW results and rewards for players of any skill
- many experts on Idle and decent Classic players to discuss a variety of ingame questions
- participation in the elite "Big D" division of CLan league

PM me, or visit our specially crafted application link http://bit.ly/joinP

Edited 10/31/2022 15:08:50

Does the spike CW activity correlate to the creation of MB? Or the increase of coin rewards? Actually these 2 incidents may be same timing. So maybe coin rewards is the real change, MB is how it

They effectively pulled many players from clans that did not participate in CW to a single clan that does, so that's a net +40 participation. And they inspired reciprocal competition from MH as well.

Btw - lmao that this is a Prime recruitment thread with click baity title.

While we're on the topic of recruiting ... MH is also recruiting. Reach out if interested.

Edited 10/31/2022 15:26:15

Separate note . . .

How to inspire CW activity even at season end? There needs to be incentive for players even at the end of the season. Ideally something that either in itself make it worthwhile to continuing playing that season (still ability to win, coin rewards, etc). Or something that carries over into the following season? Like if you play >15 days you get an automatic Free Win (don't play that day) on some day in the following season if you stay with the same clan.

Excellent visualization 5s, always appreciate your posts!

I think cw started off popular because it was new feature and still towards early part of pandemic of where we didn't have much else to do. It lowered in popularity due to longer seasons and many elite players not finding the reward/Time&Effort ratio high enough.

I consider clan wars to have gone through 3 eras so far

1. Masters Era (seasons 1-6)
Masters wins 5 of first 6 seasons, notable contenders being M'Hunters (won the other season) and TSFH . This era may have been the highest level of competition we saw in clan wars. Masters stopped trying after season 6 and Krattnarok led to end for TSFH. This era was plagued by extremely long seasons.

2. M'Hunters Era (seasons 7-13)
MH wins 7 straight in uncompetitive era. notable contenders were Excel and TLA, but no one seriously challenged MH in this era where shorter seasons started occurring again.

3. Myth Busters Era (seasons 14-present)
MB gets assembled and goes on to win 5 of 7 seasons. Notable contender was MH (winning the other 2 seasons). This era has led to a resurgence of competition where MB's all star team has dominated, MH won the others. This era has almost only been short seasons and increased rewards, so higher ROI (still low for elite players). Just about every clan from season 1 has gone through rises and falls and iterations.

Edited 10/31/2022 15:47:12

We need a clan that doesn't start with 'M' to win a clan wars season!!!!

I appreciate a good chart.
thanks for those.

Hm, got one in mind, TR? lmao

I nominate Python (;

Edited 10/31/2022 15:43:00

a b c...l m n O! we need a clan with an O to win! If only some of the other top clans would disband and join forces to create a new, somewhat "Optimal" clan...

Also, great work on the data collection and analysis 5s. Fantastic work yet again. Has Fizzer ever seen these? I wonder.

I hope to one day see a modded template get rotated into CW!

Wouldn’t it be better to make this into a table?
Season number || Season length (days) || Number of games || Participation level

Decide “Participation level” using “number of games” / maximum possible number of games.

what is maximum possible number of games though?? every clan can have 40 games per day, and there are way more clans than those who participate.
games per day is better imo

Edited 10/31/2022 15:59:03

Wouldn’t it be better to make this into a table?
Season number || Season length (days) || Number of games || Participation level

Decide “Participation level” using “number of games” / maximum possible number of games.

While this would give an easier"one number" to compare, this would "hide" the within-season dynamics (seems important).

Isn't [“number of games” / maximum possible number of games] follow the exact same dynamics as "mean daily games"? Or there might be difference?

This is easy to explain. From Summer to now the following has happened:

• Myth Busters are formed to specifically take 1st place, which adds ~40 players with ~25 daily games.
  
• Harmony is formed from Hodopian Dynasty, then merges with some clans and ex TSFH players with a goal of reforming its former glory, ~40 players + ~18 games per day.
  
• Neets upgrade to 40+ player Prime clan, right now they add to ~30 players with ~18 daily games.
  
• M'Hunters get an exodus into Optimus, right now both clans have ~50 combined players and ~41 daily games.
  
• All this time Le Furrie Azzurre have been quietly growing and using it's position as top 5 clan to attract all new players interested in Clan Wars. They add to ~40 players and ~25 games per day.

If you'd pay attention to https://wz-clanwars.netlify.app you'd see that there's a massive divide between clans. You should pay attention to how swiftly the total number of games drops as lower ranks are reached. TOP 5 clans have a completely different reality to all other clans. If you're not in TOP 5, you're basically struggling to form 40 player team and have a massive interest trouble, any talent you have, most likely ends up moving to a TOP 5 clan anyways.

I put major blame on Fizzer limiting new clans to 40 players. This forces 100% of all players to be interested in Clan Wars, which is not realistic. Clan Wars requires you to prefer real time games, have ~30+ extra minutes per day, be interested in competitive side and preferably also enjoy Warzone Idle. In order to make all 40 players (out of max 40) be interested in Clan Wars means major sacrifices and ignorance of other communities (diplo, multiday, casual and so on...). I'm not surprised that most clans refuse to sacrifice their identity to participate in Clan Wars.

Another thing is that Clan Wars are objectively unpopular. Speaking as manager of Clan Wars efforts for Harmony, I can say that only ~15% of all players (~30 out of ~210) are currently seriously interested in Clan Wars. Looking at a total amount of active clan players I wouldn't be surprised that the actual number is below 10% or even below <5%. This speaks extremely poorly of Clan Wars popularity.

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Any improvements you see in activity increase is likely due to TOP 5 clans and situation in lower ranked clans is just as abysmal as it used to be before. You should use https://wz-clanwars.netlify.app to get latest insights on clans reality and also pay attention to major clan developments. If something big happens (For example a ~200 player clan Harmony appears or top strategy clans form Myth Busters), then of course it will look like Clan Wars are getting more popular. You should recalculate your data for clans which are not top 5 and exclude brand new clans. See how many clans over last 20 seasons had an upward or downward spiral in their Clan Wars activity.

There are more things that could be improved about Clan Wars, I already made my suggestions in:

• https://www.warzone.com/Forum/654405-update-521-discussion
  
• https://www.warzone.com/Forum/648129-cw-improvement-suggestion
  
• https://www.warzone.com/Forum/642428-myth-busters-recruiting?Offset=120

In short, the templates are stale, there are minimum worthwhile rewards, there's no incentive to try something else than SEAD or SE1W, there's no incentive to be most active player in any given clan. As long as these and additional issues persist, Clan Wars will remain in poor state where absolute majority of players ignore them and feel negatively about them. Fizzer needs to work hard to make Clan Wars something great.

Edited 10/31/2022 17:29:03

Couple requests:
1) Could you break this down by time slot & template?
2) Could you plot this against account & overall game creation rates?

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Reasoning:
1) "Is Clan Wars DYING???" observed that the activity trend varied by time slot, with the bulk of the decline coming from the first and last slots of the day (which I interpreted to mean serious clans were backing off of CW), and by template (which I interpreted to mean that SEAD is all u NEAD).

2) There's some seasonality of activity on this site (e.g., picked up in Raffle Analysis), so it's interesting to not see that (at least as far as I can eyeball) on that chart. The other interesting thing to compare this to would be:

- account creation rate (account IDs- the profile ID minus the first and last two digits- are incremental, and you can figure out the account creation rate by looking at the creation time of various accounts & comparing it to the account ID)
- games/day rate (game IDs are incremental, so you can just sample API-queryable games, check their creation date, and get a good estimate for games/day over the past several years)

When I made the "Is Clan Wars DYING???" post, I recall both of those being in relative decline as this site retreated from the COVID peak:


But they're also somewhat seasonal. The rule of thumb I've loosely observed is that people tend to be playing Warlight when they're supposed to be working or in school, so you see greater activity during the school year & when people aren't on vacation & during work/school hours in the US & Western Europe.

It gives Idle awards for playing Classic. Idle players aren’t even forced to play classic. In a similar way, not everyone who plays Classic plays Idle. Plain coin awards or achievements for winning Clan War games would be better.

Maximum possible number of games is probably linked by territories in the map, number of wins and number of won games it takes to get a territory. This assumes other clans can’t take over non-neutral territories.

Hard disagree, Dan. CW bridges Idle with Warlight by incentivizing both groups to play the event:
- Warlight players play Warlight because they like playing Warlight
- Idlers play Warlight because they get Idle rewards for playing Warlight

As evidenced by Prime/NEETs, it works!

This assumes other clans can’t take over non-neutral territories.

They can't.

Maximum possible number of games

That's per-season though. But it won't distort the status much: we'd still see activity increase or decrease in terms of games/day and comparatively across seasons (assuming similar-sized season maps in terms of # of wins needed to capture all territories, which isn't strictly true). The other variable is "wasted wins" (wins that don't go toward any territory), which could go arbitrarily high.

This is why I think games/slot or games/day are the real gold standard, although those will get bogged down by season duration (since activity declines as seasons go on, because there's less room for new players to join as the slots in the top clans get taken).

While I'm not convinced that it would have a significant affect on the rise of participation, FDC's goal of making top 9 in CW to fuel our Idle addiction is no secret and does get talked about in GC from time to time. I think stunts created in frustration/amusement of how CW functions fuels the current numbers. Aside from aforementioned:

1. Creation and success of CW focused clans like Mythbusters/Mindhunters.
2. MH split/drama.
3. Clam chowder being $7.99/lb.
4. Community improvements spearheaded by many members of this fine establishment.
5. Memes.

Clearly, on average WZ membership is getting more fancy and one of the tenants is to Clam Wars with finesse and grace. ●

helps that membership is cheaper rn

What's the connection between membership and CW?

Thanks for the stats FiveSmith, interesting analysis and recruitment tool.

As was said above a lot of activity is due to the top 5 clans but attributing increased participation solely to them without data seems incorrect to me, as Samek sait FDC has been more active the last few seasons, so has Mothership and PMCOlympia I believe, but I wouldn't know if it compensated people who left. The competition for the 6-9 rewards has been hard fought.